Marcel Proust on screen. Film as a novel. Novel as a translation

Abstract

The author of Ala Recherchedu Temps Perdu, M. Proust was certainly a man of his time, which was coincidentally the beginning of the cinematic age. Therefore, it remains a relevant scholarly task to recognize the virtual connections between Proust’s poetics and filmmaking techniques: a problem S. Fokin is trying to solve in this article. Here, he focuses less on the principles of a strictly philological analysis that centres on textual elements, intertextual aspects or the book’s genesis, but prefers instead to delve into elements of literary anthropology, with its preoccupation with the unity between the author, the text and the context, which does not rule out the use of literature as a tool for comprehension of a literary personality. Such an assumption does not reduce literature to life: an opponent of Sainte-Beuve’s biographical method, Proust, for one, would not tolerate it; but neither does it reduce literature to a text as a self-sufficient structure: this position sees the book as co-substantial to the author. To summarize the findings, in order to understand Proust’s view of the cinematic art, one should remember that his almost snobbish dismissal of the meaning and significance of motion pictures was just as typical of the author as his aristocratic ideas about the meaning of literature.